The capitalist system has been utilizing the tactic of workplace fissuring to weaken the organizing power and bargaining position of US unions. This has led to a decline in worker's ability to negotiate fair wages and benefits. However, as an alternative strategy, unions have begun to adopt multi-employer bargaining [...]
Low wages and the necessity to work continue to undergird the Vietnamese economy. A web of international finance and corporations like Intel, Samsung, and Nike systematically transfer labor power and its value to their balance sheets and to shareholders. This is simply an old form of imperialism dressed up now in the guise of the free market.
During an uprising, it is unclear precisely how the end-goals—whatever they may be—will be achieved. None of this detracts from the consequences of the event unfolding in a potentially radical direction, as participants work towards building the society they hope to see.
The history of autogestión demonstrates how academic discourses and pieces of political ideologies circulate and are rearticulated with incredible and unpredictable momentum around the world. Scholarship (even excellent, well-meaning, and even politically committed scholarship) reorganizes this coeval churning of continual mutual influence to obscure some connections and exaggerate others. Prestige scholarship systematically ignores and erases how activism, popular culture, and scholarship from the Global South influence and are appropriated by European and North American scholars. Autogestión, a term I argue was coined by North African revolutionaries, becomes displaced and expropriated to Yugoslavia. In other words, scholarship is very often a process of accumulation by dispossession.
Why don’t people always act in their own collective self-interest? This classic puzzle in sociological analysis led us to question why so many workers – even the most precarious among them – were so disinterested in unions as a means to achieve higher pay and better working conditions. If [...]
The US 1619 project is aimed at making visible the erasure of Black history and contributions of Africans to early America. Seldom noted, it was the Virginia Company that directed the labour of Africans first arriving on the White Lion that year – Virginia was not merely a generic [...]
Value did not destroy slavery, human actions did. My point is that those actions were mediated by value relations. It is high time to see capital in history again both in past and present. Perhaps all the more so now, that the combined crises of world democracy, world governance and global ecology demand collective action, but collective action seems insufficient to resolve them on its own.
Du Bois's scholarship and political commitments were not fixed. Rather, his scholarship was always informed by his engagement with politics, and his politics was always informed by his sharp, sociological mind.
Happy New Year! It is time to share the 10 most read posts on the Marxist Sociology Blog published in 2022. If you missed these posts the first time around, now would be a great time to give them a quick read. Thank you to all of the contributors [...]
Labor scholars and organizers need to consider workplace aesthetics including the design of technology to better understand the micro-mechanisms that facilitate capital’s domination of labor, eliciting effort at work and affective attachment to capitalism and other exploitative institutions.
